Digital Design (MA)

Professor: Alexia de Visscher

"Design is composing an epic poem in HTML, making a fresco wallpaper, painting a portrait masterpiece in artificial intelligence, writing an 8-bit sound concerto. But it's also emptying and reorganising a desk drawer its hard drive, extracting a decayed tooth a zip archive, baking an apple pie a software program, choosing teams for a baseball game life and educating a child plotter."

Victor Papanek, Design for a Real World, 1971, remixed by the Digital Design team

The "Digital Design" orientation proposes to explore modes of graphic creation and dissemination in digital environments by taming digital production tools by "practicing" them or in other words by "doing with" them. It aims to focus on editorial forms (in the broadest sense) that rub up against digital tools and media, as these forms of publication can have several statuses, not only that of digital flows, stable printed forms or hybrids, they can be inscribed in a virtual space, or in physical spaces. In order to do this, the course proposes, among other things, to develop practices favouring diversion, hacking and poetry, magic and recipes, and sometimes slowness and clumsiness. Finally, it proposes to analyse the political, economic, anthropological and historical issues at stake in the bowels of digital objects and systems - in other words, design issues.

No prerequisite is required to follow this orientation other than being curious, daring, tinkering, transforming, colliding, understanding and sharing experiences.

The Master's programme is based on the students' personal projects. These are set up through discussions between teachers and students according to their interests. In this orientation, technology is not seen as a simple means to an end, but as a driving force for reflection and sometimes even as its starting point.

Collective projects are welcome and even encouraged; the exchange of knowledge between peers is in any case essential. Technical support will be offered according to personal projects.